Actually I now remember a couple more incidents (though these involved pupils, rather than staff)
Chemistry: Teacher uses chlorine gas to show some reaction or other. Tells us it’s dangerous. Biggest fool in class says ‘I’m not scared of anything’ and BREATHES some of it. Revived in hospital.
Physics: Imagine pupils at several long wooden desks. Teacher says sound can travel thru air. Agreement. Teacher says sound can travel thru wood. Disbelief. Teacher tells first set of pupils to put ears on desk. Taps on desk. ‘Did you all hear that?’ They mutter yes. Disbelief. Second set of pupils press ears to desk. Clever pupil whacks desk with thick textbook. All listening pupils leap up shouting ‘Aaaarrrgh!’ Hysterical laughter. Agreement.
There were a lot of pranks in my school, but only a couple I was personally involved in, both involving the Chem Lab.
The first was my lab partner and I failed horribly in an experiment, producing a foul-smelling sulfur-based substance. Somehow some of it found its way to an air vent…
The second was largely by chance. I found a bottle of glycerine in a cupboard while looking for something else. I put it on the handle of a doorknob–trapping a teacher and a whole class inside a room.
I didn’t think of this, but I bow down to the mind that did.
My high school had a little toolbooth-style shed at the driveway entrance. Someone sat in it all day long, checking to make sure the people entering had parking permits/and or a legitimate reason to be on school property. The guard also made sure that no students left the school without a gate pass before the final bell.
On the last day of my sophomore year, someone caulked doors of the guardhouse shut. The tollbooth arm had to be left up all day. Summer vacation started a few hours early for those of us with cars that year!
I went to a high school a couple miles from O’Hare Airport. For senior prank day (it was a semi-official thing at my school at the time), we got our hands on a surplus weather balloon (about 12 feet in diameter) and a tank of helium. We took about 40 feet of line and made a loose collar around the school’s metal flagpole * inside* the flagpole’s rope. We tied the other end to the balloon, filled it and let it go.
The balloon rose until the loose collar caught on the metal pulley at the top of the pole. No one could figure out how to get it down. O’Hare sent an investigator around to figure out when had suddenly appeared on their scopes. (It wasn’t high enough to be anywhere near flight paths, but apparently O’Hare’s radar could pick up objects 60-70 feet off the ground, even in 1979.)
Oh my god, I thought that the VW thing was a rarity, but maybe not!
In 8th grade I was going to a school where the front entrance had a small, raised area with brick walls on either side, sort of a porch in front of the doors.
The space between the walls was about two feet wider than one of the teacher’s VW Rabbit was long. About 6 of us picked up the car and lifted it onto the porch, not only blocking the car in, but blocking the front entrance to the school. It stayed there for several days.
Another time, in high school, we had this old geometry teacher who was half-senile, always mumbled incoherently, and was incapable of keeping his students under control. His normal approach to unrest in the classroom was just to ignore it and keep mumbling or writing on the board.
We used to shoot spitballs at the board, trying to hit just ahead of the spot where he was writing, to see if he would react. One day somebody brought a wet, wadded up paper towel into class. While the teacher was writing, the kid whipped it at the board right where he was writing. It made a HUGE thwapping sound (big water splat, too). The teacher stopped briefly. Then, without turning around, he just moved over slightly and kept on writing on the other side of it. Damn, that was funny.
Not my story, and not high school, but worth telling, I think.
My sister took an Intro to Psychology course in first-year university from an instructor who always paced back and forth across the front of the room as he lectured. Somebody had been reading ahead, and on the day he was going to talk about operant conditioning, they agreed to get him.
Every time he walked one way, the class would pay perfect attention, but every time he walked the other way, they would shuffle papers, drop pencils, stare out the window, …
By the end of the class, the instructor was pacing back and forth in the five feet at one side of the room, and hadn’t noticed until the ringleader pointed it out.
That sounds like it should be worth a letter grade bonus!
Hooboy, lots of pranks here! I’d probably get arrested these days. Ah, youth!
I concocted mixtures in the chem lab on several occasions that would, if agitated, react to produce a great deal of heat (I forget the chemicals, but I had to carefully introduce a powder into a viscous liquid so that it remained suspended until shaken). I would then place it in a glass bottle at a conspicuous location on a teacher’s desk. Picking it up to move it triggered the reaction–rapidly heating the bottle. Result: the teachers invariably expected it to burn them (or thought that it had) and dropped the bottle, spattering a substance resembling a mix of pea soup and pureed rotten eggs around. Harmless, but nasty.
Less harmless. I didn’t just hack the school computer system–I installed it. I had root access, and I locked out the service account the company had left in it. I never used it to fix grades or attendance (mine were annoyingly good anyway), but I liked browsing the stuff the faculty put on the system. My favorite was auditing the principal’s…inventive…financial records and responding to his diary entries. I never actually blackmailed him…largely because he invariably gave me anything I wanted after he figured out what I had done.
Here’s one that would be taken more seriously now than it was then (I didn’t do this one, though I admittedly instigated it): Several friends carefully crushed and separated hard peppermint candies, throwing away the pink/red parts, to obtain a fine white powder which they stored in a plastic bag that I conveniently had in my pack (pure coincidence–I also had a rubber chicken, a pair of handcuffs, and a couple of lockpicks in there). Then they filched straws from the cafeteria and borrowed a girl’s compact. They arranged the powder on the mirror, waited until the principal was walking by the class, and snorted the peppermint through the straws. Entertainment ensued–the teacher had that incident thrown in his face for years.
Then there was the Blowgun and Firecracker Incident, and the new architectural ornaments (gargoyles and concrete lions–those were a pain to carry up the stairs!), the incredibly vulgar song on the school play soundtrack, the little wooden idol that Ms. Bornagain Zealot kept finding in her (increasingly thoroughly locked) office…
Ah yes, pratting about in Miss Smith’s (Only at the end of the school year did she tell us her first name was Fanny, I wonder why?) History class with my friend Dan, who simultaneously went on to become National math championship finalist, and my Step-Aunt’s lover (she was his math teaching assistant and ten years his senior, but that’s another sordid tale).
After a bit of tic-tac-toe on the worksheet, Miss Smith informed us that we could direct ourselves to the dean’s office. We sauntered up to her desk and picked up the hall pass laying there.
Turns out that the hall pass was signed but otherwise entirely blank. Needless to say, we had great fun watching the girl’s softball team work out that afternoon.
To the same teacher (NOBODY liked her) my sister’s class put a brown construction paper star on her chair (while she left class to go to the bathroom) with glue on one side so that when she sat down it would stick to her butt. She came in and sat down and it stuck on the back of her Gucci or whatever expensive brand dress right on her crack. The whole class was hysterical and she NEVER noticed. I wish I had been there…
I wasn’t there for this one, and I forgot where I heard it, but it’s funni as hell anyway…
One day a college professer stood up in front of his pupils holding a glass of liquid. The professor said “This is a jar of urine. I am now going to taste some of it, and I want all of you to do the same. I’m teaching some important lessons today, the first one is to trust me.” So the professor stuck his finger in the jar and licked off the urine. The students were disgusted, but guessed that their teacher knew what he was doing so they did the same. When the glass had made its’ rounds, the professor said, “Here is your second lesson…pay attention to every detail. Everyone seemed to miss that I stuck my index finger into the urine, but licked my ring finger. Class dismissed.”
you said ‘One day a college professor stood up in front of his pupils holding a glass of liquid. The professor said “This is a jar of urine. I am now going to taste some of it, and I want all of you to do the same. I’m teaching some important lessons today, the first one is to trust me.” So the professor stuck his finger in the jar and licked off the urine. The students were disgusted, but guessed that their teacher knew what he was doing so they did the same. When the glass had made its rounds, the professor said, “Here is your second lesson…pay attention to every detail. Everyone seemed to miss that I stuck my index finger into the urine, but licked my ring finger. Class dismissed.”’
How can you trust a man who promises to taste it, then doesn’t?!
(Mind you, if that’s a whole lesson, I want to work there )
sk8rixtx – KICK ASS!!! That’s so like me to do. I once had a Polish immigrant to our school convinced that “spork” is the worst swear word in the english language, and that if anyone in the yoohoo asks him if he wants to go to the snack line, they are offering him drugs. It was funny. I told him the truth afterward though, and he wasn’t too hurt about it. I only waited a week.
For our senior prank this year, we’re trying to do the following:
Background info 1: We live in a rural area, so a lot of our school lives or works on farms. This works out to our advantage.
Background info 2: Our school is shaped like a big square around a central enclosed courtyard.
The plan: Sneak a bunch of chickens and (if we can) a cow in to the courtyard one night at around 3 in the morning. How we’d do it: Send one or two students up onto the roof using a ten foot ladder. Send another ladder over with them and two more students to be in the courtyard. The other two or three students pass the roof kids the chickens, which are then passed down to the courtyard kids. Chickens safely deposited, we all go home. The cow would have to wait until school was open, though, ebcause you can’t really pick a cow up onto a roof adn down a ladder.
Mine was in Highschool. They took the condoms that they had passed out in health class and filled all the tips of them with half and half and hung them on the door knobs to all the teachers offices.
We also had a teacher with the first name of dick. So , I dared someone actually paid em $5 to walk up and ask him. “Do you have a pencil dick?” I told them to play dumb afterwards and say that she did not mean it the way it sounded she just could not find a pencil for the examine we were doing … whewwie did she get in trouble
god, this’ll seem so lame compared to all your legendary pranks but Ill tell it NEway.
Im in year 9 and in chinese class the teacher really hates me. Every morning I put a pot plant on her seat until she cracked and went schitz at the class. I, with my superb will power, was able to act natural, but my friends weren’t and were laughing so much. So she sent one of them to the focus room because she suspected them with no proof.
damn bitch…
)